


The Way of the Dead

by gul



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Ghosts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-23
Updated: 2015-09-23
Packaged: 2018-04-23 02:59:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4860473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gul/pseuds/gul
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The ends we choose can be the same as the lives we choose.  Abigail, Beverly, Will, and Hannibal, all find their ways.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Way of the Dead

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to Halia Meguid's lovely song "Forensic," which inspired this piece.

I. LONG LIVE ABIGAIL HOBBS

At first she floated. Like a kite cut loose by the knife at her neck, she flew up and away; she never saw her body again after watching it disappear in the spreading red slick she choked to death in. As ever, it was her blood that brought her wherever she went.

When she began remembering again, she found herself in forests, the places where she had been happiest. She hadn’t expected that. But, Abigail realised, she tended not to think past the next birthday, her life being what it was and so often out of her own hands.

Time stopped holding any meaning at all. In the beginning of her life-in-death she experienced flickers of time and glimmers of space—mostly night, always with the moon out. Quiet dark times, with the chirp of crickets and the slur of wind in branches, the soft inebriating smell of pine. Bright times in dawn with the colours warming into what seemed a song as the sun rose. And all she had to do was float.

She liked the moonlight best, cold and pure. One night, curled in the leafy branches of a tree she didn’t recognise, she thought of the Halloween she had dressed as Artemis, fashioning a crescent-moon headband of silver lamé and cardboard. The memories were distant and strange, almost an aftershock of a fever-dream, but they startled her and she almost fell. They were the first thoughts she had of her old life since—and then it came back, hot and dark and choking.

Abigail was still Abigail. She didn’t feel different—just a little cold. She could float, now, yes, but only so high. She could never make it past the treetops. Certainly never the moon.

Time started to stretch. The memories, as they came faster and faster, assembled her back into a heavier sort of creature susceptible to strange tides, pulling her back to familiar homes and faces. Love was a thread binding but what if those taut hateful fibres were tied by monsters? And if death did not cut you free, what could?

She found herself by Will Graham’s side, unwilling, once more. 

She played giving and regretful, the way she never was in life, the way she was not in death, and saw him respond with relief instead of confusion. In the solemn church, in his hospital room. 

See, I made a place for you, he mewled, like all she was was a shadow in need of a place to throw herself. His shadow. An empty space of her silhouette, the young-girl pattern sewn together of all the love she knew.

The scar seam on her neck still persisted; she could feel it under her slim pale fingers and feel Will’s wet eyes on it.

It repulsed her. Any eyes repulsed her now.

She floated.

“Are you my guilt come back to haunt me,” Will asked, as she crept along ceilings in the early hours. She doesn’t say anything. The blood she gushes down her neck, splattering to the floor but never landing, is answer enough, she figures.

She watched him drink and she watched him lose weight. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he sobbed, as she sat cross-legged in corners when his new wife was out of the house, the whiskey he downed the only warmth in the room 

(She would never have whiskey, she realised. Never have the sharp gold burn of it on her tongue. Never taste what to Will was now the sun.)

She appears quietly in the back of car, after realising that sometimes his wife could see her. She had a little control over her visibility but sometimes people could see her. Like that priest. Like Molly, that one strange time. She hated being seen. That hadn’t changed.

One night while driving on the back roads of his house, Will swerves and cries out, as he catches her wide blue eyes in his rearview mirror and her bright smile, all quite white in the moonlight.

“What do you want,” he asked quietly, halfway on the abandoned shoulder. They were a long way from nowhere but Will’s house. “What can I give you? I don’t know why you are here but if you want to stay than stay, just forgive me.”

“You’re wrong, you know. I let him kill me.” she said, quiet, unsure if her voice still worked.

Will’s fingers tightened on the wheel. “No honey, I know it’s better to think that, but he killed you because of me.”

The certainty, the selfishness, disgusted her, and she considered leaving and letting him rot alive. 

“What do you want, Will?” she asked. 

“Forgiveness.”

“No.”

He shudders, he sighs.

“For it to end.”

“I wanted the same thing. Or I thought I did.” 

Will’s shoulders straighten. For a detective so keen to others, he gave absolutely everything away. Her old faux-father Will was back. “What do you want, Abigail? I’m here for you.”

She wanted to scream but she sat there silent as Will wept. She wanted to scream I am not your daughter I am not your sister I am not what you would have me be you have no idea what I want—

But she realised that she did not know what she wanted. This wasn’t supposed to be my life, she thought, she knew—but what was?

“I want my life,” she said, and leapt up and out of the stalling car to flee into the forest and leave him crying, spilling salt and not blood like she had to. The price she had to pay always so much higher then that of the men who would protect her.

Flying forward, she felt the same strange pull upwards.

Abigail slid through the trees like a slip of the knife, sliver and bright and bloodstained. And there she sees the woman she had seen only twice before, whom she had watched die. She stares, stunned, and the woman looks sad even though she smiles, her black eyes warm even in the rare and scattered white light.

II. WHEN YOU WALK AT MIDNIGHT

The woman in the red jacket did not float. She walked, in midnights.

Beverly had found herself walking in unknown woods after losing herself in that black lair. She had been there for Hannibal. And now she found herself walking a strange path, but it did not frighten or confuse her. She knew there was an end, and even if it seemed she walked the same straight path though the same strange woods over and over again each night. She felt a strange pull forward.

And her life like any had been full of dark and also full of light. She fought and laughed and it was her heart that had brought her to where she was today. The end of her life had been a winnowing down, from a large family to small group of colleagues to finally just herself, in the dark.

She had never known where she was going even in life, had pursued sports and music and then criminology and fibre analysis and then it all was cut loose, a story half-finished. But she had never feared, even in her darker moments, that something wasn’t just around the corner, and that she would face it, and that she would again find joy.

The woman walked, half a shade.

That night, Will Graham walked too, in the place he had last seen Abigail. He had not seen her for some months. He wondered if she was looking for her. 

Just as likely, though, he thought with a sting, was that he was searching for all he had lost. 

The night was clear and cold, and the cold made him feel he was breathing some chilly ether from another world. He thought of watching his old house like a strange ship. Will had always felt at home in the water. It called to him even more strongly now. He wondered if he was feeling some final pull, ever downward, the same way gravity and time seemed to work with him and Hannibal. Lost in the black claw curl of the endless sea of oblivion.

And it was his mind that had brought him to where he was today.

So many pieces of him gone, that he had meshed and bled with others only to be taken from him. He had already lost Molly and Wally to the dragon. He had lost Alana and Beverly and Hannibal, to Hannibal. And Abigail. And now he had lost Abigail even again.

What was that line, he thought ruefully, about fool me once, shame on you? Fool me twice. Fool me three times fool me again and again and again…

A soft hand on his shoulder, warm. He flew around and cried out at the surprise—

Beverly.

“Wanted to say boo,” she said, “but that might be a bit on the nose.”

Will could not help but spring forward to embrace her, even if she were a dream, a ghost. There were no wounds on her, that he could see. No severs or seams. But his hands went through her. He could not embrace her. 

Beverly grinned, wryly. 

“Don’t worry about it. When I first came to, first thing I looked for was my cell phone in my pocket.” But then she saw his face, and hers softened, the same way it always had to not embarrass him. “I miss you too. Guess words will have to do for both of us, huh.” She had that same easy inquisitive warmth, the concentrated and clever grace, that he remembered. 

“I’m so sorry.”

She waved her hand, as if at an insect, and scrunched her face. “Let’s not talk about that. Wanna walk with me?”

He nodded, feeling dizzy, like the cold air had replaced his blood. She shone a little, he fancied, in the dark. Her bright button eyes and flash paper smile. In her jacket red like old blood, her slim frame slipping in between the slim trees.

“I dreamed of you,” he blurted, because what do you say to a ghost?

“Last night,” she said, airy, “I dreamed, I was dreaming, of you.”

“Morrison?”

“Tom Waits. Oh my god. I thought you were cool, Will.”

He almost flushed even in the cold, always the perfect target for her gentle teasing. “You’re just like I remember you.” Not, exactly, like Abigail had been.

“You sound weirdly satisfied.”

“It means I remembered you well.”

“What?”

“What’s a ghost, but a trace in memory?”

“What is a ghost but a trace. Jeez, Will. Do you think I’m just in your head? Do you think she is too?”

He doesn’t say anything. Everything he thinks of sounds foolish, false. A ghost, he realised, probably was beyond feeling embarrassed.

But he did, though, he really did. He wasn’t sure what happened after death but he was certain these girls, these ghosts, would not exist outside him. And if they were here, he was anchoring them.

“I’ve…I’ve built places for all of you,” he offered lamely. He didn’t want to say the phrase “mind palace” out loud to Beverly. She would laugh.

Beverly laughed anyway and didn't bother walking around the black poplar tree blocking the path but disappears for a moment inside before she comes out. It’s a sad laugh. “Ah, so I’m here for you.”

“No no,” he hastened to add, ducking under branches to catch up. The spidery scrape of them stung his hands and face. “For yourself.”

“I am here for you, too, though, Will. Like I always was.”

“Are you always here? In the forest, I mean.”

“Of course not, dummy. In any case, I’m going somewhere.”

“Where?”

“Don’t know.” She stopped, looking off somewhere to the left and pinching her lips together, before moving on again.

Will didn’t notice. He didn’t follow her gaze, and he didn’t see Abigail, pale face framed by dark leaves like a low moon. He kept walking with Beverly until dawn when she faded, mid-sentence.

Abigail followed Will from a distance, thinking of Artemis and Actaeon, and the power of deciding how and by whom to be seen, and the pleasure of ripping men apart who denied her that choice. She watched Will and for a moment saw him trailed by blood.

Hannibal had once drawn her as the goddess, as Artemis, with sharp little arrows and wide eyes that shone empty and white.

III. HJEMSØGT

Abigail is rewarded by Hannibal’s slight flare of eyes and momentarily parted lips. She is also rewarded by the sterility and indignity of his confinement.

“Here to haunt me, Abigail?” he said.

“I could just be in your head.”

“No.”

“No,” she admitted. “Anyway, right now I feel like the one being haunted.”

“In Danish, the word for haunted is ‘hjemsøgt.’ A perhaps very literal translation of that is ‘home-sought.’ Are you seeking home, Abigail?”

She smiled at the sting, bright and brittle, with her round eyes blank—why, you could fill in almost any intent you wanted her to have. That was her design.

“You’re low on that list.”

“I did as you asked.”

“And so did I.” She floated up, making him raise his gaze. “Will can see me too,” she blurts, ruining the effect. “I can fly almost anywhere I want, long as it’s somewhere I’ve been. And here’s another cool trick, I can carry things.” She floated over to his desk and picked up a piece of paper, and smiled.

Hannibal smiled back, every inch the proud father, in his own way, watching his false daughter fall back into her old ones.

III. THE WAY OF THE LIVING

The nights were cold now, and Beverly hardly missed the comforting crunch of her boots in snow. She imagined she could hear it now. It made her think, fleeting fever thoughts, of warm black summer nights where the air hung so heavy even the fireflies drooped lazy loops, flashing gold—and how she and her brothers would catch them.

She missed them, her brothers. She missed the fireflies too, the buzz and thump of them in the mason jars and the magic fire of them all released at once, flying up and away and elsewhere.

She missed them but it didn’t weigh her down. She knew it would make sense soon. Beverly had never feared the unknown.

Abigail had always looked a lovely sort of ghost before her death and it had not changed now, except for the red line cross her throat. She fell in line with Beverly like she had been doing it forever.

Beverly rubbed the girl’s shoulder affectionately, as greeting. “How’s my girl.”

Abigail stared at the ground in front of them, eyes wide and mouth twisted. Every time they reached a tree she quickened her step to walk through it, a kind of petulant attack.

“Beverly. Why am I still here. Why am I still here around everyone that bound me in life. Why can’t I escape from any of this.”

Beverly was silent for a moment, testing words in her mouth. “You know, each night I that I can remember, I am walking. Each night I get a little further.”

“Aren’t you angry?”

“I am…a little regretful, sometimes. But I know I won’t be here forever. I am moving forward, along my way, like we all do.”

Abigail was silent.

“You know, I thought I would see my father,” she finally said, tilting her chin up while still keeping her eyes on the path. “I thought I would see the other girls. You know, the ones I…we…I used to, you know.”

“Aren’t you glad that’s over?” Beverly laughed softly. “Sorry. I know I’m glad I don’t have to like…go grocery shopping or clean the bathrooms.”

“Why do you think you’re still here?”

“Probably because I left a little too early. But I’m still who I was and I am still going along my path. I think it’s just like life—we’re here to be ourselves and nothing more. We’re here for each other, for all we can give.”

“I never got that chance. It was taken.”

“Your path hasn’t ended, Abigail.”

Abigail stopped, and took a sharp breath like she still had tears to fight back. She was searingly envious, all of a sudden, of Beverly’s warm bright centre of her soul, when all she ever felt she had was a series of shifting lines to read.

Beverly stopped with her, examining her face.

“You know,” Abigail said, smiling, meeting her eyes as if to challenge her. “Sometimes I want to give them what they want.” And she removed she letter from her jacket pocket, holds it up as a dare. “This’ll start it. It’ll kill them both.”

Beverly sighed, and gently closed Abigail’s hand over it.

“Oh sweetie. You’re not a part of their story anymore. Not if you don’t want to be”

And it could be true, Abigail knew. No one to tell her what to be now. No one to play against, no one to dance around. She feels—for a moment—utterly unmoored—floating—

“I want to give him what he wants,” she says, firm. “What he gave us. “

“I’m so sorry, Abigail.”

An old joke, now, that phrase. “They said they would protect me.” Another old joke.

“And they didn’t, and now you can be free of them. Don’t keep running this—this groove, I guess. You can be free now, if you want. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about that, being exactly who and how you want…”

Abigail was silent. 

Beverly smiled and brushed her hand softly over Abigail’s hair. They were a sort of sisters, the two small women who had died in the dark. “Guess we’re both looking for home, huh. “

At those words, Abigail turned and ran. She ran far and fast, a small slim-legged deer darting through trees and over snowbanks. Faster and faster—how fast you can run, when you don’t need to draw breath! Until she reached a meadow with the high crescent moon slicing through clouds. It seemed a cupped hand, beckoning.

Perhaps, this time, she could escape, the moonbeams her own knife wielded by her own hand—

Midway through the meadow, she leapt, and flew, forwards and up. And for a moment she soared, up and up, away from the world and everything that used to hold her, and for the same brief shining moment she was herself and she was free.

But she could only get so high, and instead of rising she crashed into the top of the high snarled branches, catching herself before she fell further, and gasping.

She had been cut loose by a knife, but she still couldn’t get far enough off the ground. She was still tethered, to the old world, to them.

To grow is to change, and to change, something must die. Nature’s way.

She sat in the treetops and watched the moon set. The world was black and white and blue and still. 

Will thought Hannibal had killed her only because of him. Beverly thought she should be done with them both. And as she floated her way down back to the snow warm with dawn, she considered it. Throwing Hannibal’s letter into the sea and leaving them to re-establish non-recorded contact on their own, and maybe when they both died she could be really free. The path of forgiveness.

Abigail thought again of Artemis and Actaeon, and how she knew, as Hannibal had always known and as her scar held testament, that it was always cruellest and most satisfying to let someone have what they want.

IV. WE ARE ONLY PIECES

The snow was gone now but it was still a mean wet cold in the forest at night. Beverly felt none of it but Will shivered in front of her. He must have run right out to find her, after the little white letter was laid by his bedstead. And there was no Molly anymore to care.

“Please,” he said, holding it out to her. “Maybe you can see something I couldn’t.”

Beverly’s mouth was pinched, swallowing back any number of things. “Can’t believe you’re coming to me with this, honestly.”

“You were always so smart. So clear-headed. You could see things we couldn’t. You never fell apart, no matter what.”

“Except for that last time, huh,” she said, and then laughed at both her joke and his expression. “Oh my god sorry I’ve been waiting to make that one.”

Will at least looked sheepish, raising his eyebrows and smiling.

“What do you think I can see in it that you can’t?” she said.

“If I am misreading his intentions. I need a second pair of eyes.”

“Will, this ain’t middle school; I’m not gonna read your note from fifth period to see if your boyfriend really really likes you.” She sighed. “I did fibre analysis, Will—do you even know what that means?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then tell me.”

“Okay, well—you detect fibres on materials, pull them off and identify them—“

“No, I don’t pull apart. I bring together. I match things, Will. I match one piece to another and tell you if it’s part of something else. It’s identifying parts of a whole, wherever they’re found. This bullshit—” she jutted her chin to indicate the letter, “well. Think of it like this. You are parts of a whole. You have to decide what constitutes the rest of you. I can’t do that.”

She started walking away, slowing when she heard the wet slop of leaves and shrubs as Will ran to keep up.

“That was pretty dumb of me,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“It was, and thank you.” She turned to him. “Listen, Will. I won’t be here much longer, I think. I am getting closer every day to—well, I don’t know. But I know there’s fireflies there.”

Will didn’t answer but Beverly knew well his habit of trying to blink away pain, and the shiver in his face as he clenched his jaw. “I will miss you. Having you back—having you not just be one more…victim…”

“Oh Will. I don’t mind it. Not anymore. We’re all pushed out of our own stories one way or another, and our memories and traces repurposed. That’s the way of the living, and the way of the dead.” She paused. “I’ve forgiven you, Will. You need to forgive, too. I think it’s the only way you’ll be at peace.”

He pulled his thin coat around him closer. “Maybe.”

Bev’s warm eyes sparkled. “You could walk with me, Will,” she said. “It’s calm. It’s quiet. Like a soft stream you lose yourself in.”

“I…I can’t.” He couldn’t. He was being pulled away and down, to the bottom of the roiling Atlantic. He did not feel her same pull forward.

“I know, kiddo. Thought I’d bring it up, otherwise I couldn’t forgive myself. I care for you, you know. So I’ll tell you this—be careful of Abigail. She doesn’t know her whole self either. And she could cut you up to make it.”

“Abigail? Abigail would never do that.”

“I’m not saying she’s doing it on purpose. You didn’t—well, you didn’t do it to me on purpose either.”

“You don’t know her very well.”

“Better than you think. I mean it. Be careful.”

Will crumpled up the letter and threw it into the woods. “There.”

Beverly cocked an eyebrow.

“It’s a start,” he admitted.

The sun was beginning to rise, the light warming to pinks and blues. Beverly began fading, and Will’s heart was falling.

She walked on, turning her head over her shoulder as the sun came up. “Goodbye Will,” she said, her black hair swept and tumbling across her face, made gold by the sun that turned her black eyes to fireflies. He didn’t think to answer till it was too late. 

It was the last time he would ever see her.

V. HERE FOR YOU

Abigail Hobbs whispers in Will Graham’s ear. She comes to him now in hotel rooms, in convenience store parking lots, in lost grimy places far away from the wood and worn upholstery and the warm friendly bodies of his cabin. He welcomes her now without protest or question. She is the only respite, his one treasure that Hannibal had not taken completely.

She goads him, though, into talking of how it might have been if they had all lived—and how it might be if they all joined her.

“Isn’t that what you wanted?” she asks, her voice all bells and honey.

“We could all be together,” she’d whisper, “and he could hurt no one else again. You would never hurt again. You’d never have to deny yourself.” Lies no longer taste of ash when you are dead but have substance, like crumbled clotted blood.

“I hoped I could save you,” Will said, slurring, putting out his hand roughly to cup her face, as he drowsed one predawn. “If I listen to you—I can’t even save myself, can I.”

“Maybe that’s just fine. I let him kill me, after all,” she said, and laid down next to him over the matted covers as he slept. 

One and the other, under and over cheap covers, almost father and almost daughter, if not of one flesh then of one mind.

Abigail Hobbs swirls in Hannibal’s cage of sterile glass and white wood. She swims and caresses around and through him, mocking his immobility and his implacable face, his implacable heartbeat. They were still entwined, false father and false daughter, if not of one flesh than of one heart.

“I killed you, Abigail,” he said, like the calm fact it was.

“I told you. It was my way out.”

“And yet you are still here.”

She smiled her sharpest little smile. “For you.”

Will, she tells him, is going to let him go. Take him to the Cliff House, where you took me. 

I can only go, she reminded him, where I know the way.

He nods, and his smile breaks slowly.

She had never had her own life when she was alive. Never no one’s daughter, never no one’s prey. But now—oh, now. A ghost, a goddess, what’s the difference in the end?

VI. THE WAY OF THE DEAD

This last night, Beverly walks alone.

Abigail waited on the roof, and watched the three men slice and stab each other to oblivion. She only grew apprehensive once, when the Dragon bled his great wings and life into the rock. She expected something to rise, some angry soul—but nothing came.

She only saw what she always knew—the whole scene a shining black in the white moonlight.

Abigail watched as Will threw them both from the cliff into the roiling sea. She felt her white throat, all whole now. The scar was gone.

It had ended after all.

And nothing rose from the sea, just as the stones. It was just as well, because Abigail was for the moment frozen. Anchored in place and being pulled down.

She had planned, once she knew they were gone, to fly as fast as she could to the other side of the world.

For one sick moment, she steps forward toward that blind cliff and the cold ocean. She knew that if she sought them out, she would never be alone again. The thought of Hannibal’s hard eyes and sharp face—the thought of her father’s face. The thought of Will’s face. She steps forward and feels that same strange pull. 

A family, forever.

Abigail looks up, and sees the moon is bright. And she knows her way.

She started toward the cliff, and ran, and ran, and as she reached the edge she leapt—and she flew, up and up and up and far away.

They had fallen into the sea, black like blood, and she, Abigail Hobbs—she would rise.

And somewhere Will and Hannibal wandered and would always wander, the lovers swirled eternal in their own black inferno. And somewhere Beverly walked, but not for much longer, she knew that now, she would soon arrive at the end of her path and it would be warm there, and kind, and she would not walk alone. And somewhere else, somewhere high and far and silver-bright and free in a life known for the first time only to her, was Abigail Hobbs, no one’s daughter but the moon’s. 

We shall not see her here again and we cannot know where she goes, for we can only know so much while we live. 

And that is the way of the living and that is the way of the dead.

**Author's Note:**

> find me at lipstickmata at tumblr.


End file.
